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For this issue, …mbg invited Veronica Roberts to
give us a sneak peek of works included in An Exchange with Sol LeWitt.
The exhibition, on view at Cabinet magazine’s headquarters in New York
(January 21-March 5) and MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts
(January 23-March 31), is organized by independent curator and writer
Regine Basha. Currently based in New York, Basha lived in Austin from
2002-2008, where she organized independent projects, worked as Adjunct
Curator of Arthouse at the Jones Center, and co-founded
Fluent~Collaborative.

In keeping with the two-part nature of the exhibition, …mbg will
feature a second installment of coverage for the exhibition. Check back
for a review by Roberts in our February 18th issue.

Sol LeWitt began trading works of art in the 1960s, swapping
paintings and drawings with artists such as Robert Mangold, Robert Ryman
and Dan Flavin. Little did LeWitt realize at the time that his MoMA
coworkers (Mangold, Ryman, and Flavin worked as security guards, while
LeWitt was an evening receptionist at the museum) would become enduring
friends, or that these early exchanges would evolve into a lifelong
practice that would result in a collection of more than 3,000 works.

Taking as her cue LeWitt’s generous practice—which began with friends
but ultimately included pretty much anyone who asked—curator Regine
Basha created the exhibition An Exchange with Sol LeWitt. In her open
call for submissions, she invited anyone interested to submit a work of
art they thought LeWitt would like. Tributes poured in from around the
globe, from people who knew and loved Sol to distant admirers in Brazil
and Slovenia. Students from schools across the country responded to the
invitation as well, including the School of Visual Arts in New York
(where Sol once taught), the Rhode Island School of Design, Indiana
University, and an entire class of fourth-graders from LeWitt’s hometown
of Chester, Connecticut. The gifts came in every shape and size, such
as a small jar filled with remnants of a scraped-off LeWitt wall
drawing, a wisdom tooth, a CD of Cedar Tavern Singers (a Canadian
“art-ernative folk art band”) singing an extraordinary letter LeWitt
wrote to Eva Hesse, and an anagram from Lucy Lippard. Beginning this
week, all of the nearly 1,000 works of art that arrived at the offices
of Cabinet magazine or landed in Basha’s inbox will be on display at one
of the exhibition’s two venues: at Cabinet magazine’s Brooklyn
headquarters or MASS MoCA. Below is a preview of a few highlights from
the hundreds of works in the show.

Jackie McAllister, a New York-based artist and author in his forties,
paid tribute to LeWitt by constructing a cube out of red, yellow, blue,
gray, black and white stacked Lego pieces—a playful nod to the primary
colors that LeWitt used as the building blocks of color for his wall
drawings. Although LeWitt restricted himself to using just the three
primaries and black or gray in his wall drawings for two decades, by
layering lines and bands of color he was able to produce every hue
imaginable.

Leah Beeferman, a 28-year-old artist based in New York, first learned
about LeWitt’s work as an undergraduate at Brown University. As she
recently relayed to me, the elegant drawing she produced for the show
comes from an unexpected source: “Lately I've been very inspired by
scientific and mathematical diagrams and patterns. I was hoping to find a
pattern that would feel LeWittian but would be based on a mathematical
principle.” After consulting with several math-savvy friends, she
finally settled on a mathematical pattern of growth known as a “cobweb
design” because of the chart’s resemblance to a spider’s lair. “I felt
like this combination of order and disorder made via a systematic
process—especially one based on lines and geometry—was really suitable
as a gift to Sol LeWitt.”

An artist in his forties living and working in Buenos Aires, Daniel
Joglar embraces chance and intuition in his work, as his 2006 Workspace
exhibition at the Blanton Museum in Austin attested. In this photograph
of pick-up sticks, first clenched in a fist and then scattered, Joglar
offers a wry nod to the instruction-based nature of LeWitt’s work,
although the instructions here seem to be simply to let go.

Lacey Fekishazy’sLearned LeWitter emerged from her experiences
helping to realize half a dozen LeWitt wall drawings in the current
exhibition at Dia:Beacon. “Engaging and inspiring other artists came
naturally to Sol LeWitt” is the first of ten reflections that the
30-year-old artist shares in shaky, all-caps text in the drawing. While
the work she did at Dia was grueling—for three solid months her job was
to hold a straight edge so that senior drafter Anthony Sansotta could
lay down perfect lines—Fekishazy clearly relished the process.

In
his fifties and based in San Francisco, Sid Garrison makes colorful
abstract square drawings out of colored pencil. Working at a modest
scale and within self-imposed limitations, he nevertheless finds ways to
make exuberant shapes, patterns and line dance on the page, as seen in
this small, pink drawing. Garrison’s work, like LeWitt’s, reminds us
that the artistic possibilities of ordinary pencils remain infinite.

One of the unexpected highlights of the show is an anagram Lucy
Lippard made, which she presented below the inscription, “LOSS but still
LOL from SLO LL.” An acclaimed art critic, curator, activist, and
author of more than a dozen books, Lippard (now in her 70s) met LeWitt
through their jobs at MoMA—she was a page in the library when he began
working at MoMA selling books at a counter before becoming an evening
receptionist. After forging a close friendship with LeWitt, Lippard
curated a group show at Paula Cooper’s Soho gallery in the fall of 1968
that featured the artist’s first wall drawing.

Veronica Roberts worked closely with Sol LeWitt when she
coordinated his retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 2000. She is
currently a Senior Researcher for the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Catalogue
Raisonné, to be published digitally by Artifex Press.